Gridlock escape system pioneered by Ford

I'm creeping along in a mock traffic jam behind the wheel of a Ford S-Max hatchback - but my hands are not on the wheel. And neither, for that matter, are my feet on the brake or gas pedals. This lackadaisical mode of motoring is due to the fact that I am the first journalist to test "drive" the latest vehicle automation technology from the Ford Motor Company of Dearborn, Michigan.

I'm on a test track at the University of Aachen, Germany - just down the road from Ford's European research centre - and I'm trying out Traffic Jam Assist, a system that's supposed to take control of your car in low-speed bumper-to-bumper traffic and let you get on with - well, anything else you want to do in the hour or so a day that Ford estimates most of its customers spend in snarled traffic.

While several projects aim to completely automate the car, it's interesting to note that the people who actually make vehicles, and who are on the sharp end of working out safety standards with government transport departments, are taking a stepwise approach, in which the car is only very gradually being automated. It started, of course, with the automatic gearbox, then adaptive cruise control - but now Ford and other manufacturers are shipping cars that use radar to stop automatically if you attempt to rear-end another car, to sense blind spot risks and which can park themselves with smart algorithms that use ultrasound to steer you - hands free - into the teeniest of parking spots.

Traffic Jam Assist is the latest of such technology. It harnesses a battery of sensors - cameras, laser-range finders, 2.4-gigahertz microwave radar and ultrasonic transducers - to give the car the dynamic situational awareness it needs. It is effectively a low speed version of adaptive cruise control.

Back in the car, and advised by Ford safety engineer Thomas Lukaszewicz, I drive initially in the middle of a lane behind another car and, as that car slows to a stop, so do I. Then I press a button to engage Traffic Jam Assist, take my hands off the wheel and my feet off the pedals, and wait for the guy in front to pull away. And when he does, the tech kicks in: a front facing camera seeks out the lane markings while the radar senses the car ahead and the laser its range - and my car then pulls away automatically, following it almost magically.

As the guy in front slows to a stop, so does my car. Next time around though, he nips out of my lane and another car sneaks into his place - yet none of this confuses the sensors in Traffic Jam Assist.

When the traffic gets back up to speed (and that ideal speed is still under research) an alert beeps to tell me to take control again. The same happens if too much lane switching occurs around you - letting you assess the situation and take control. That's done using the ultrasound sensors usually used for close-quarters sensing during automatic parking.

The range of sensors will allow complete car automation in the future (Image: Ford Motor Co.)

"The objective is comfortable driving in a traffic jam, so you can really lean back in your seat and just do something else," says Lukaszewicz. "We're giving you your time back." If you're short of something to do, Ford is developing an internet radio app for its proprietary, Microsoft-developed in-car entertainment software, Sync, which links dashboard apps to car occupants' phones and tablets via Bluetooth.

All in all, Traffic Jam Assist looks a promising technology - even in prototype form it feels like a robust system - and it should be arriving in Ford production cars sometime between 2015 and 2020. Audi is developing a similar technology on a similar timeframe.

However, Ford and its rivals will need to ensure their ever-more-powerful car automation measures are controlled by properly proven safety-critical software.

Pim van der Jagt, director of Ford's Aachen research centre, says one of the chief software security aims is locking down the automated car of the future against hackers, once cars are communicating with each other about their locations using vehicle-to-vehicle communications systems. The idea is that cars will be able to automatically travel alongside each other in fast, fuel-efficient "platoons" in which each car knows the GPS location and heading of the others, avoiding collisions.

"Imagine if a hacker manages to create a 'ghost car', sending out information about a car that doesn't exist," says Van der Jagt. "It might appear that a car is speeding through the traffic at 100mph and is not going to stop. So all the cars will see that information and will try to get out of the way of this car that doesn't exist, creating total chaos. We need to develop security measures to stop that. But we think we have the technical answers."

...or you could just pass the over-engineering and buy a motorcycle or bicycle! Bypass that traffic jam completely and safely.

The problem with tech like this is when people start to read a book or answer a phone thinking the car will do the job for them. They then sue the company when they hit something/someone.

fordskydog
on June 26, 2012 7:00 PM

I don't like how it is still stop and go. If everyone kept a few car lengths between them and the car in front, and if everyone looked ahead of the car in front of them to the next three or four cars, It would be a slow steady creep instead of constant stop and go. If this system can't combat the stop and go then it won't be accepted by the drivers I think. And I won't like it personally.

Rodney
on June 26, 2012 7:13 PM

Its so nice to know that the technology used is going to be so cheap, ultrasound units were used for rangefinding back in the 1970s? on Polaroid cameras, the 2.54 Ghz radar dates from the same time, but Maplin stopped selling them years ago, now we have even cheaper and more reliable solid state versions, cameras were used in the Playstation 2, and are currently in wide use on Nintendo 3DS (Dream Radar) and PS3, and for the Lidar, especially given Microsft, well, its nice to know the Kinect works there also. All in all, currently $500 of equipment, including the games console needed to handle and process the data.

Im afraid the single reason I will refuse to have anything to do with this system, is that it is being handled by Microsoft.

Look, they cant even gurentee their machine will work properly, never mind perfectly, at a critical public presentation, how can you possibly expect them to get it right in millions of cars in throwaway versions?

NASA uses PCs, and I beleive some products, maybe they need to be considered at a absolute minimum, given a spacecraft exploding kills its crew, a car going out of control can easily lead to a hundred dead pile up.

gadgetmind
on June 27, 2012 5:47 PM

Does it understand box junctions, roundabouts and traffic lights? I can see people turning this on and then reading the paper!

I also wonder how it will come with all the two wheels that will be constantly overtaking? Will it brake for them or just get all wistful and jealous?

Jon
on June 28, 2012 6:08 AM

I already just see the results. People go to sleep at the wheel in a traffic jam (not that they aren't asleep anyway). Then the gadget goes beep and the human just carries on snoring. Causing another traffic jam. Great idea!

Rich
on July 1, 2012 5:27 AM

How is this a "gridlock escape system?" It drives for you, but does not avoid gridlock. The new crowdsourced traffic from Apple's iOS 6 phones upcoming soon will do much more. I can hardly wait! And you Android fans, I'm sure Google will do something similar